Due to a temporary bout of insanity we have left our perfectly fine home in Austin. We’ll return a year later after visiting about 30 countries. You can keep up with our plans, misadventures, and dreams right here. And if you live or are traveling in our neighborhood please let us know.
Evan is an incoming freshman. Vivian is a senior. For each, back to school was a bit of an event this year – Vivian’s last and Evan’s first at high school. Vivian left at the crack of dawn and drove to school for Senior Sunrise on the Hill. And I dropped off Evan at his new high school in the opposite direction. I managed to get a couple of shots outside the front door as I have for years.
If you are wondering what the heck is Evan doing in the second photo, which I would if I didn’t have a teenager, he is “mewing”. Not like a cat, but you’ll have to google it. Here, at the start of the summer holidays, they are both having fun doing it. One more thing we can blame on what we old people call social media, but for them, it’s just a part of life, like oxygen or Kendrick Lamar : – )
Just before school started that morning, Jo caught up with Vivian for a celebratory event and got a few photos too. In the last photo, she’s with her Ms. Gibbs’ carpool friends.
Later that day, as is a sacred tradition now, Jo and I got back to school drinks before lunch. For Jo and me, it was the last time both kids go back to school together. Though there is no reason to not keep celebrating through their college years too.
Happy back to school to all you kids and teachers and parents. Yes, technically, summer is over.
Evan graduated from Magellan. It wasn’t unexpected. But it is still noteworthy. Unlike Vivian who has spent some time at Magellan, Rawson Saunders, and Stephens, Evan has been a Navigator all his life. Magellan has been family.
Like any good global citizen, he should be able to curse fluently in three major languages. He may have also picked up an interest in science, a curiosity for the humanities, a love of art, and some passing ability in soccer and track. His teachers don’t seem to hate him (or they are super polite), he has made a few friends, and somehow some of the IB learner profile characteristics have stuck. All this while being a digital native (born four years after the iPhone), at peak social media, and having spent a quarter of his life in pandemic related craziness.
Shabash beta. Or as his Grandma Bina would simply say, “Bhaalo”.
The last few months have been one big party: a Model UN trip to Dallas (he represented Morocco and got some sort of resolution passed regarding the use of nuclear energy and was recognized by his peers), followed by a class trip to Spain (the travel there took 42 hours because of a small weather related hiccup on the first leg – they had a great time and no one really complained, which says a lot about these kids and their teachers), and then getting ready for graduation.
At graduation, Evan delivered the class speech in Mandarin which is funny because he has been plotting for months to be demoted from the advanced Mandarin class. Graduation was emotional for many of the kids. They have literally been together as long as they can remember. And for parents and teachers too, who have seen each other five days a week for the better part of a decade.
And then the pool parties began.
A special shout out to Ms. Jennifer, a reader of this blog and someone we have known for so many years. Thank you for everything, but mostly thank you for putting up with Evan for all these years.
I think all of us can agree that every day is Father’s Day. So I’m ready to play it down when it rolls around each year.
Nevertheless, the family marked it beautifully earlier this month. Before it got too hot we went for a walk down Bull creek. You’re thinking – hmm – a walk? But they all hate going on walks with me. I use the word hate because “intensely dislike” doesn’t cut it here. Thus I was suitable impressed. Ouiser swam in every deep cool spot she could find in the creek. The kids clambered up a boulder. We stopped to admire the last of the black eyed susans and bee balms, going to seed after a prolific spring. Then we stopped at Juiceland on the way back home before everyone got absorbed back in our own living. The small things that make a day in our lives. And the small beautiful joys. I am not unaware of the sheer dumb luck that got me here to this point in space and time. And of the fragility of it.
I had chatgpt write a very vanilla Christmas Letter for 2023 from a low-effort prompt. I got what I deserved – an average quality middle school paper. Contemplate this for a moment: two years ago everyone except for a literal handful of people in the whole world would have been astounded that a computer would write a middle school quality paper from a short prompt. Now we are miffed that it can’t do better.
But the bottom line is that I need to go back and fill in voids in the blog now. Manually. Hrmmphh.
Which takes me back to chronicling our December 2023 for the blog. We started the month with house guests. Jo’s friend visited from upstate NY, and Ousier’s cousins visited and they brought their mom too. When I was a newly minted home-owner is the hazy past I had a house mate and when she moved out, another. They were both old friends and it was easy. I assumed that I’d always have a housemate. That was before the idea of being married and having our own rug rats be our semi-permanent house mates had permeated my thick skull. Which is all to say that I like house guests in general and we enjoyed these in particular.
Sometime in the middle of all that it suddenly became cool enough to go camping in Texas. If the night temperatures are above 60 I’m staying home with my air conditioner on. But by the start of December we were predicted to get a few cool nights and Vivian called her friend and the three of us went to Colorado Bend. It turned out to be cooler that night than her friend’s sleeping bag was rated for (I think we went down to the mid-20s) and they had to sleep in a pile to stay warm. The next morning we went for a walk and tramped around for about 10 miles. They loved it. First question on the drive back: when can we do it again?
After a couple more weekends of double headers in San Antonio, one day in mid-December I took a photo of Evan and his Legends team mates. May be it was a really bad photo because on the drive back to Austin after that game Evan said he’d like to take a break from club soccer. That was that and suddenly both of our weekends and three of his weekday evenings opened up. I hear of his friends who are in gymnastics or swimming who practice five mornings or evenings a week and go to a tournament during weekends. God bless them and their parents. We are not them.
Speaking on Evan’s friends I got to see them all a few days later. Months ago Jo forgot to put a “not” after “do” when she was asked what school activities she would volunteer for (I’m serious). So she ended up organizing the middle school Winter Dance. Evan and his student government friends helped her set up. And I was volunteered by Jo to be the photographer. I patiently stood at my camera in front of the photo backdrop while 6th, 7th, and 8th graders in singles and groups of up to 20-30 showed up and posed for the camera. The insta generation loves a camera.
Before we knew it, Christmas Eve was here. Staying with tradition, Carol and Sadie came over. Vivian helped Carol make her famous chicken dumpling soup and Jo and I didn’t argue if a chicken in a young hen or any hen. On Christmas morning we opened our gifts and had a good time. Here are the memorable gifts: Vivian gave me a caving trip and three days later I got to spend three hours deep underground, squirming through tight holes and sloshing into cold dark subterranean pools. Evan gave Jo a “30 Day no complain pass” and then didn’t complain (at least not very much) for the next 30 days and we all enjoyed that very much. And Jo gave Carol an electric trike. She took it for a spin down the street right away and loved it. The bike had arrived in boxes and Jo had assumed that it would be semi-assembled. It wasn’t. We didn’t have to mold the tires from rubber granules but we pretty much assembled everything else. There were screws that were fastened with screws. My guess is that the company that makes the tricycle is really a screw company and to increase their sales of screws they created a bike made up wholly of screws. Anyway, that’s how I ended up spending Christmas Eve in the garage with Vivian joining me for hours at a time (the day before that I took a 15 hour trip to California for my friend FT’s birthday).
Then we loaded up the trike and the kids and dogs and Grandma and headed down to Nicolle’s where we were joined by more kids and dogs. We ended the day as we usually do by celebrating Carol’s birthday. Vivian had made set of fake flowers for Carol and it was well received. Carol’s hand-made “head towels” for everyone was her gift and I wish I had a picture of all of us in the head towels.
Back in ATX we finally had a backyard and a swimming pool after months and months of construction. We inaugurated the hot tub on cold night and had friends over for a quiet NYE party. Vivian and her friends braved the cold and took a polar plunge into the pool as the clock struck midnight. And quite suddenly it was a different month and a new year and perhaps a future blog post.
I’m trying to get caught up. It turns out that I don’t blog (or walk) when I’m busy. But that inner monolog doesn’t shut up.
On a crisp November morning last year, the Friday before the week of Thanksgiving, Vivian and I hopped on a flight to Bangkok. We spent the first three days at Sharath’s 60th birthday party at a Hua Hin, a beach resort town about three hours from Bangkok on the Gulf of Thailand side of the Malay peninsula (it was on the other side of this narrow strip of land that the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami had killed over 5000 Thai residents and foreign tourists 19 years ago). Then we moved on to Bangkok for Sanjay’s son’s wedding – which was a marathon 4 days of even hardier partying. Over the week I got to spend quality time with a dozen school and college friends and their spouses and some of their kids while partaking in the ongoing birthday and wedding festivities. Vivian was doted upon by my friends. A grand time was had by all. Special thanks to Professor Ghosh – I borrowed from his extensive wardrobe of designer label Indian clothing without which I wouldn’t have known what to wear.
Before Vivian was fully un-jet-lagged we were back at the airport enjoying a last mango and sticky rice and heading back to Schiphol where Jo had booked us an overnight stop at the airport hotel. By Thanksgiving Sunday morning Ouiser and were doing our thing at St. Edward’s park wondering if it was all a dream.
We went to Panama for spring break. Jo planned a lovely trip – a few days in Panama City and around both ends of the canal, a few at a beach on the Pacific coast, and then in a town nestled inside the caldera of an extinct volcano.
The main part of Panama City is modern and bustling with high rises and snarly traffic but it is surprisingly easy to drive around in. The part of the city we fell in love with is Casco Viejo – the old quarter. The funny thing about the old town is that it is the new old town. The OG old town was already a 150 years old in 1671 when the Governor ordered it burned down so that there would be nothing left to pillage by Henry Morgan, the pirate who later became the Lieutenant Governor of Jamaica (and a plantation owner and namesake of Captain Morgan’s, the rum). In 1673 the town was rebuilt with better defenses at the current location of Casco Viejo. More recently, it has been reborn again as a gentrified posh tourist area with nice hotels and restaurants, beautiful churches, and lovely old apartments.
The Lucky Gas on its way down to the Pacific at the Miraflores locks
And then there’s the canal. There are tales of international intrigue, medical science, and engineering in its origin story. Not too briefly (you know me), the French, under the leadership of Ferdinand de Lesseps, fresh from his success at the Suez canal which opened in 1869, took the first crack at building a canal across Panama in 1881. The Suez is a sea level canal that was excavated through mostly sand. Panama is neither sandy nor flat. By 1889, de Lesseps was done and bankrupt and over 20,000 people had died during construction of a half completed ditch. The main cause of death: malaria and yellow fever. Even as recently as 150 years ago, these diseases were attributed to “miasma” or foul air. The Americans saw their opportunity. Over the next 15 years the US engineered the independence of Panama as a new rebel country from Colombia, bought rights to the canal zone in perpetuity from the newly independent country, bought the remains of the French construction and equipment, and paid Colombia off to recognize Panama’s independence. US engineers were apparently disembarking in Panama before it had even officially announced its independence. The planned American canal was to provide a much needed way to transport people, goods, and military supplies between the two coasts. Even pre-canal, the fastest and most comfortable way to travel from San Francisco to New York was two steamers on either side and a short trip on the Panama Railroad across the isthmus.
At about this time, a Cuban doctor, Finlay, hypothesized that if a mosquito bites a human with yellow fever, and then bites a healthy human, the healthy human gets “infected” with yellow fever. At last a disease vector! By draining swamps and using screened netting, the incidence of yellow fever in Havana dropped precipitously. Walter Reed and Gorgas, two American doctors, were quick to comprehend this new thinking and propel it further. Just a few years prior to this, in 1897, Ronald Ross in Secunderabad, now a neighborhood of my hometown of Hyderabad, had put it all together when he found the malaria parasite in the blood of infected humans and in the gut of infected mosquitoes, for which he got the Nobel prize in 1902. When Gorgas arrived in Panama armed with this new knowledge, it was one of the two reasons why the American Panama Canal succeeded where the earlier French attempt had failed.
The other reason was that the American chief engineer ditched the idea of de Lesseps’ sea level canal. The Chargas river was a part of the French problem – turning from a rocky, dry bed during the dry season into a torrential flood for most of the year. A few French engineers had broached the idea of an artificial lake and lifts on either side. In 1906, John Frank Stevens, the self-educated American chief engineer, successfully pitched the idea to Roosevelt. The idea is simple. Instead of digging a sea level canal through mountains, dam that Chagras. Use the artificial lake to flood the central part of the isthmus to 85 feet above sea level. Most of the 50 mile voyage between oceans would be over this lake. Build locks on either side to raise and lower ships up to the lake. Use gravity and the water from the lake to float the ships on their 85 foot uphill and downhill journeys. Stevens, his successor, and Grogas got the job done, along the way building the largest dam and largest artificial lake of their time. Still, over 5000 additional men died building the canal. It officially opened in 1914. For the next 100 years it remained practically unchanged. Ship builders made Panamax sized ships that are huge but can still pass safely through the locks.
The canal was handed over by the US to Panama on December 31 1999. This was the result of a treaty signed by Carter in 1977, and followed a worsening of relationships between Panama and the US. And in between, the US sent in troops in 1989 to end the dictatorship of Noriega. Other than that it appears that things have worked out well. Post-Noriega, Panama is a vibrant democracy – we were there during election season. The Panama Canal is very well run and in 2016 a new larger set of locks were added.
We visited the 110-year old Miraflores locks on the Pacific side and watched Lucky Gas, a liquified gas carrier, transit. The next day we went to the Atlantic side to the new Agua Clara locks and saw G. Paragon, a Neopanamax size ship, transit into the Atlantic. The voyage from ocean to ocean takes less than 12 hours and a Panamanian pilot takes over command of the ship during this time. Tolls average $50,000. Each transit requires about 50 million gallons of fresh lake water to be emptied into the oceans. The lake water is replenished by rains. Americans are one of the biggest water guzzlers on the planet. We use 100,000 gallons of water per home per year on the average. That is 500 homes’ entire annual water needs for one ship. Over 1,000 ships do this every month – when there is enough water. During the dry season, the canal authority decreases the number of crossings to conserve water. Wait times become longer. That thing you bought at Costco last Sunday takes longer and becomes more expensive to get here from China.
The G. Paragon, a Neopanamax, approaches the Agua Clara locks from Lake Gatun, surrounded by its phalanx of tugsThe G. Paragon is in a lock in Agua Clara on its way down to the Atlantic
I thought it was all pretty amazing. The kids and Jo were impressed too. But for about 15 minutes. Then it’s just another fucking ship going through the fucking canal. After a couple of days of this we drove off about 6 hours due west (Panama is almost horizontally placed on the map – like a laying down shallow S with the Atlantic to its north and Pacific to the south). The roads were easy except for the extra patience I had to find. There were frequent cops checking for speeding and how I didn’t get pulled over half a dozen times I don’t know. The speed limit on a couple of toll highways is 110 km. Otherwise it is 90 km on most highways (that’s about 70 and 55 mph for the metric-disabled). If you are used to driving at 90 mph it feels like your life is passing you by. Except when your google maps is telling you where to turn next. Every road has at least six names on the map except the two you actually see on the physical signage. And google reads all of the names out in the most awful non-Spanish pronunciation you can imagine. So things get interesting at turns.
Once we left the main interamericana highway 1, the drive to our next destination reminded me of our trip to the Guanacaste region of Costa Rica – understandably because we’d be there if we had kept driving for another 500 miles. We got to our beach house and pool and lovely uncrowded bay where we hung out for the next few days. We slowed down and swam, walked, surfed, ate, and drank. There was a very good grocery store about a 10 minute walk away with pretty good wine and superb fresh pineapple. The restaurants were a five minute walk away. In the mornings or after dinner you could walk for an hour on the beach and perhaps see one other person with their dog. Evan and Vivian rented surfboards and Evan even got Vivian to take the boards out at 7:30am on the morning we were heading out to get a last bit of surfing in. Jo and I swam in the pool and a bit of the ocean and read and I worked on my computer (there is high bandwidth wifi everywhere on earth now : – ). This is the view from my poolside office. That’s Vivian, Evan and Jo on the other side sitting out in the sun.
In case we need to find this place again – it’s Playa Venao – I’ve dropped a pin.
Next stop – El Valle de Antón. This is small town tucked away inside the caldera of an extinct volcano. The numbers change somewhat between the different informational signs around town, but it has been extinct for at least 13,000 years. Perhaps as long as 56,000 years. We climb from the coastal plains into cloud forests and pass lovely small hamlets with volcanic rock churches and tiny street-side fondas advertising the day’s menu on chalkboards. And then we careen down precarious hairpin bends, aka switchbacks. We’re in a beautiful little town with manicured walkways and stately mansions. The trees are full of blooms, yesterday’s flowers cover the sidewalks. Coffee, fresh fruit, and pizza places abound, along with local sancocho restaurants. We are at a nice little hotel called the Golden Frog inn at the end of a street with amazing flowers. There’s a bonsai section with ancient looking bonsai bougainvillea. I learned next morning at breakfast that a tortilla in Panama is a fat little corn cake.
Vivian and I went zip lining one day. We swam as a natural pool, and I hiked up towards two of the peaks but never made it to either because of strong winds and a spot of rain but down in the town, the weather remained nice and temperate.
The trip was a little bit extra special because hours before we left home, Evan got his acceptance letter from LASA. When we got back from Panama, he officially said no thanks to St. Stephens, and decided to be a LASAraptor for high school. Yay to him though Vivian is slightly disappointed that her little bro won’t be at her high school for her senior year. Speaking of senior years coming up, Jo and I also realize that this may have been our last or second to last family spring break for a bit, assuming that college kids go off and do their own thing for their spring breaks. Wow – after 17 years of getting used to one thing, change is coming.
That is my winning entry for the world’s worst license plate tag line (when I first arrived in Texas, Oklahoma’s license plates said “Oklahoma is OK” – which is still a strong contender in my opinion).
Jo and I never know what to get the kids for their birthdays. By the time I start thinking about it the night before it is too late to do anything even on Amazon. But this year Jo got the ball rolling early and Vivian scored a ski vacation in Utah.
Vivian’s school gives them a 5-day weekend in early February immediately after their term exams and Evan’s school does no such thing. So Jo bought Vivian and me flights and found us accommodation at Deer Valley, Utah. It was a surprise gift. Vivian squealed with joy, packed quickly the night before, and I picked her up from school right after her last exams and we drove to the airport.
Deer Valley is the country club of skiing. We didn’t know that. You get dropped off and picked up right at the lift. Hundreds of happy green jacketed hosts help you with any questions about the slopes. The lodges are posh – with huge fires crackling along merrily. Every lane in every lift that whisk you to the top of groomed slopes have little real wood boxes containing tissues – for your nose between runs. And no snowboarders here!
We needed all the tissue that first day while Vivian found her feet (she tumbled 8 times). By the last day I was hopelessly chasing way behind her.
The weather was glorious the first couple of days. Sunny deep blue skies and the snow wasn’t bad. We scoped out the mountain and found our favorite sequence of runs and the nicest dining with the best fireplaces (the small dining hall at Empire Valley lodge). The last day it snowed pretty hard. And we loved it.
We mixed just the right amount of socializing into our après- skiing. One night we met Sharath’s nephew and his family for dinner at the very nice Caffé Molise in SLC. Siddu was a young unmarried junior doctor at the Apollo Hospital in Jubilee Hills and he dropped by my mother’s room to say hello the last time I saw him. That was more than 20 years ago. The next night we trekked across the valley to Stephanie’s and had a great evening catching up with Aunt Dorothy and the crew. For our last evening Vivian and I went to Kuchu Shabu, a happening shabu-shabu place for her “birthday dinner” (in quotes because her birthday wasn’t for another two weeks) and she splurged on the Japanese wagyu.
In between skiing (Vivian rises late when she can) I got my work and zoom calls done and it only cost me a few hours of sleep. And far too quickly we were back at the airport getting on our flight back to Austin.
Returning to where we started: Vivian remarked that the snow on the last day was like butter. Hmm – the buttah is bettah in Utah.
This video and the dogs and the snow was created without a single photon bouncing off a puppy or a snowflake and into a sensor. Instead someone entered the following oddly incomplete sounding prompt into Sora, the new text-to-video tool from openAI: “A litter of golden retriever puppies playing in the snow. Their heads pop out of the snow, covered in.”
Seeing is believing was never fully true and magicians and optical illusions inhabited the cracks in our perceptions. It was called trick photography when I was growing up. Photoshop made that available to the general public in the 1990s and it was what was used to airbrush ads and photos of celebrities. CGI became a thing at the movies and we marveled at Gollum in the first Lord of the Rings at the dawn of this century. This same technology allowed Marvel to become an entertainment powerhouse for the next two decades and for three hours at a time we inhabited make-believe worlds filled with make-believe characters.
But it wasn’t cheap, easy, or fast. You know this if you’ve waited till the end of a Marvel movie to see that post-credit scene. Before that you have to sit through many minutes of screens-full of people’s names at FX or Weta or a special effects studio. It literally took a studio full of people and computers to trick you into believing what you saw.
About a year ago you could create almost photo realistic images of a monkey in an astronaut suit riding a horse (many of us did). Dalle-E, MidJourney and Stable Diffusion invaded our imagination and our screens.
Recently Google, Runway, Pika, and others allowed us to make a few seconds of videos of anything you could put into words. The motion was jerky, the pixelation crude, but it was fascinating. Today OpenAI announced Sora. The era of seeing is believing is over.
Close your eyes and imagine three fluffy goldens playing in the soft snow. Puppies wrestle, snow flies, ears flop, deep brown eyes stare. Snow sticks to black wet muzzles. If I could now pull that visual image from your brain and put it in a 20 sec video it would probably not be very different from Sora’s video. Neither is the process inside Sora. It has been trained on billions on visuals of dogs and puppies and snow and perhaps even puppies playing in the snow, and sentences with those words. Based on that composite image in its artificial mind, it creates this video. Training Sora is very expensive. Only a handful of companies worldwide have the deep pockets, technology, access to needed silicon, and the legal muscle (the ethics are bing questioned in courts) to pull this off today. But the rendering – the “inference” as it is called – is almost effortless, compared to the cost of producing the same video using traditional FX techniques used to make the Marvel movies. You prefer Dalmatian puppies in the mud? Just retype the prompt and hit return.
Those of us that lived on both sides of this day will remember when seeing was believing. Hereafter there won’t be any expectation that reality and video are or should be related. That will seem like a quaint idea in time. We will go to the cinema, in the words of my friend Professor Ghosh, to watch Oscar-winning movies fully generated by AIs. With nary a human actor or a cinematographer in sight. In the words of Benj Edwards from ars technica, “Even when the kid jumped over the lava, there was at least a kid and a room.” Tomorrow, there will be no kid or room and certainly no lava.
I imagine that Taylor Swift’s proud mum posted a grainy video of the young Taylor captivating the crowds with a song when she was three at her friend’s bar mitzvah (oh my, how pretty – don’t tell me that was an iPhone 7! Makes me feel so old). This is just like that except that Evan isn’t three or singing.
Enjoy a short video where Evan chats about the Bose-Einstein Condensate, the fifth state of matter. I believe he is available for the bar mitzvah circuit.
Vivian’s school offers a nice range of respectable sports. She can play hockey or soccer or beat people up at lacrosse or run around a basketball, volleyball, or tennis court. She can run track or cross country and do yoga or swim. But she picked caving and climbing. So she goes off into holes in the ground with her other caving people and a very well regarded caving instructor who doubles as their English teacher and comes back filthy and without her headlamps (it’s easy to shop for Vivian – just buy her a headlamp because she has usually lost hers and mine).
Last year she became one of the co-captains of the caving team and says it is a job with responsibility. When she checks a newer caver’s knots and signs off on his belaying it is a big deal. The school organizes multiple caving and climbing trips through the year and they sound amazing.
This last Christmas Vivian gave me a caving gift. Three days after Christmas we drove for about an hour and a half and met a guide at the entrance of a cave. Jo had already surreptitiously measured me to make sure I was of less than 51 inches in circumference which meant that unless I did something very stupid I wouldn’t be stuck in the cave and need a rescue. Vivian had reminded me to bring a trash bag for dirty clothes and a change. Down we went.
We emerged three hours later, having belly crawled, climbed, stooped, and dropped through tiny openings in rocks. We sloshed through knee deep ice cold dark water. We stared at veins of white crystal deep underground and at stalagmites and stalactites that glowed vividly under UV light. We came face to face with tiny sleepy solitary tricolor bats hidden in crevices. We even stopped for a snack break underground.
I liked the caves but I wasn’t unhappy to I look up and see the sky afterwards. Vivian, thanks and happy to do it again.
Notes from Dad 